Weirdo in a Weird Land

One of the more irritating parts of creating the bundle was referencing the image resources. Mac Applications are supposed to keep their data in a Contents/Resources but using the provided SDLMain, your application’s working directory is the PARENT of the resource bundle… so you’d have to make the assumption that the end user didn’t rename the application bundle on you and build your path including what you think your resource bundle is named.

I modified the SDLMain a little bit, putting the working directory at the top level of the Application Bundle. This allows me to reference my image files as: Contents/Resources/Images/ which is still a little ugly, but probably more reliable. The “correct” thing to do would be to have SDLMain expose a method which allows me to retrieve the path of individual resources. That’s probably a much later change though.

My most recent efforts are to get a Windows build going. I’d like to do the up front work to make this game cross platform. This way, I can release builds for both Mac and PC/Win32 relatively easily in the future. My first attempt at creating a Win32 build was using Visual Studio 2010 Express, but I ran into a lot of strange linking issues. The compilation process was tough too. cl.exe command line compiler had radically different invocations than gcc… so it’s unlikely that I’d be able to reuse the same Makefile. There has to be an easier way to build a windows app than this…

The SDL Tutorial suggests using mingw32 which is a minimalist windows toolchain built on top of all GNU tools. This means that I *SHOULD* be able to reuse my Makefile and if it’s part of the tutorial… I shouldn’t run into weird issues. We’ll see how that pans out. Hopefully by Thursday I’ll have a slightly expanded build that runs on both Windows and OSX!